There is a difference between sensible environmental policy and a War on Coal. I don't think Obama is attempting to wage a War on Coal.

But it's tough to deny that some people are, in fact, trying to do this. It's that precise mentality that drives the people who want to buy it all up and shut it all down.

Yes, but that's not War On Coal thinking. The WOC folks are attempting to use force to ensure that we funnel all our money into their pet technologies Right Quick (tm), and that this will quickly get us back up and running. And if it doesn't, then we'll just have to Conserve (tm).

PNG is great for everything but actual photos, and should be used for just that: everything but photos. But photos really do need the extra boost from lossy compression.

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but wasn't OpenWrt based on this same firmware? Or is this bug with the VxWorks-based firmware that Linksys later switched to?

Even if we limit our scope to routers-as-initially-purchased, there's still one stock model that runs Linux out of the box: the WRT54GL. It was made after Linksys otherwise switched to vxWorks, in an attempt to keep a hand in the Linux market.

I've got one. I flashed it with Tomato, but it definitely came with Linux on it.

I don't think I am, actually. I have bent over backwards to make conciliatory gestures to the more extreme camps, pointing out at every turn that the current situation is not a good one even as I demonstrate how it remains preferable to the currently-known alternatives. I realize there is nothing I can do to satisfy the outright irrational elements out there, but where I see the possibility for reasoned discussion, I take it.

Are you telling me that BRIC (Brazil/Russia/India/China) doesn't rush immediately to mind? Brazil and India might not be too problematic, but they're collaborating with a pair of outright dystopian regimes. The US has fallen far, but it still has a very long way to go before it would even belong in the same league as these.

Actually, I would argue that this level isn't deserved. Like I said, there are degrees, and I pointed out why the alternatives are even less worthy of trust. When all options are bad, you go for the least terrible and fight to change it. In this case, that means the US.

The stewardship the US has exercised has been far from perfect, and recent years have shown it to be even worse than previously believed. But for all that, even within the context of recent revelations, it has still proven considerably less-intolerable of a steward than any other proposal yet put forward.

For all the EU's talk of Internet freedom, most nations have moved to curtail it within their own borders, and their efforts have achieved considerably more support within their borders than the corresponding efforts of the US: not a good sign. The UN-based proposals, meanwhile, are almost universally fronted by foxes seeking employment as henhouse guards, and not only does the UN lack any provisions to exclude them from this kind of power, it considers this a feature, not a bug. Allowing a body like that control over communication simply is not sane: too many foxes will hold too much of the power too much of the time. And then there is the move by the BRIC nations to set up "their own Internet," which suffers the same problems as the UN proposal, only with the the foxes enshrined permanently at the top of the heap.

With these options, what's left? The US has shown that it cannot be trusted, but there are degrees of untrustworthiness, and while the publicly-known actions of the US are inexcusable, every other nation or group that has put forth a bid to succeed it openly intends to do far worse. The US is simply the best of a bad lot, and with no other lots coming down the pipeline, I see no other solution for now.

This. I'm forced to wonder: did astronomy also appear on this survey, and if it did, how many people answered that both were "sort of" scientific? I suspect that a lot of answers of this kind were a misguided attempt at compromise by people who didn't know which was which.

Visual programming environments will never succeed, as long as the goal is to be "better than text". In the current attempts, one writes code with shapes and connecting lines instead of with letters and punctuation, but the linguistic concepts behind the code are still recognizable and readable. The catch is that this turns out to be a far less efficient way to encode language than text is: it's harder to write, and it's harder to read, so people inevitably gravitate back toward text, and the visual aspect is forgotten.

Does this mean visual programming is doomed? Not necessarily, but it needs to refocus its goal on something much more radical than attempts to date have really done. Current attempts try to be "better than text," and even the article here seems to advocate this approach. Instead, they need to focus on being better than language. This is where visual programming really has potential: rather than trying to replicate what text can do, it needs to focus on what text can't do.

How would something like this work? I haven't the faintest idea. I literally cannot imagine what it would be like to code without language. But a lot of concepts have emerged, even just during my own lifetime, that I could not have imagined before seeing them. Perhaps this is the same.

So there's my challenge to the "visual programming" folks. Express to me the nature of (and a possible solution to) some moderately complex problem, without using language of any sort. Manage this, and your task is largely finished: all that remains is to come up with a visual editor for encoding information in your chosen method. Do this, and you will have your revolution.

If you thought you knew CSS and JavaScript three years ago, but you haven't done much since then, relearn them. They're rapidly becoming very different beasts from what they once were.

This is not where we need to be, nor anywhere near it. But it is a step in the right direction, and should be both encouraged and taken.

This does not mean we should let up in even the slightest degree. Far from it: we will need to intensify the message after this, to counteract the inevitable complacency that comes with having done a tiny amount. But this is how battles like these are won: take what is offered, then demand the rest, and repeat until you've got it.

It's kind of scary just how much saner Tk still manages to be than most other toolkits, even with the cruft and stagnation.

Good luck getting your hands on the right SIMMs, though.

Why not just call this a Grinch move and be done with it?

At this point it's more like a kind of bullion than a currency, per se. You can store and transfer raw value in BTC without much trouble, but other than a few notable-but-narrow exceptions, you can't walk into a store and buy something with it.

Since it doesn't act much like a currency yet, and probably isn't going to within the next five years or so, it doesn't make much sense to treat it as a currency yet. But you have to treat it as something, so for now, treating it as an asset makes the most sense. When and if the situation changes, the laws can also be changed.